System Design Flows, Requirements and Implementation

Abstract

An effective system design flow supports all phases in the life cycle of an electronic product (section 2.1). A system design flow therefore must account for the inputs associated with each of the life cycle phases. The flow is furthermore required to support the tasks and activities within each phase, and to provide for the desired outputs and deliverables. These preconditions and postconditions constitute a set of technical requirements on system design flows (section 2.2.1). When trying to assess all design flow requirements however, economic aspects may not be ignored (section 2.2.2). Over the past years, the importance of these economic requirements has increased considerably, and is expected to continue growing rapidly [13]. This chapter proposes a hierarchical system design flow to meet both the technical and the economic requirements (section 2.3). It furthermore reviews the tools and formalisms currently available for the practical implementation of the tasks and description levels in such a hierarchical design flow (sections 2.3.3, 2.3.4, 2.3.5, 2.3.6).